Dear Readers, The world that existed last week no longer exists. Shocked by Russian aggression, the Western world has rallied to Ukraine's defence, spurred on by images shared widely on social media of Ukrainian courage and the heroism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The entire EU, US, UK,
I am an Englishman in Southern Russia. For nearly four years I’ve lived here, helping my Russian ex-partner bring up our (now) eight-year-old daughter. At 9 o’clock last night I saw both of them onto a sleeper-train to Moscow. From there they will fly to Italy and the
My mother could always sense the difference, the alienation, between me and my father. It’s not that we didn’t get along. It’s just that there was almost nothing there—nothing in common. He was American football, girls, tailgating, hunting, the Air Force, that one story about being
Hot Capital is money that moves quickly and mimetically, following the latest fad or culture war skirmish. And right now, huge sums of money are being mobilized and channeled into projects, companies, and causes as a result of inflamed, rivalrous passions. The rise of this “Hot Capital”—made possible by
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay talks to Substack’s founder and CEO about empowering writers through free expression (and his company’s new, foosball-table-free San Francisco offices).
If Putin succeeds in his aggression in Ukraine and the Republican Party follows Trump in his admiration for what he has done, then it will be making a decisive break with fundamental American democratic values.
So much is being written about the Russian invasion of Ukraine that more on the situation on the ground is unnecessary. Certainly, it is premature for a post-mortem on causes and responsibilities of a conflict that came on so quickly and unexpectedly. But it is not a bad time to
Putin’s Neo-Soviet Russia reverted to form with its systematic doping regime at the 2014 Sochi games.
On February 2nd, I wrote an opinion piece entitled “Beware the Anti-Fascists, for they have become what they oppose,” on behalf of the UK-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR)—a research centre for which I served, until recently, as a policy and practitioner fellow. That article began
Dear Readers, As I compile the articles for this week’s newsletter, Russian tanks have entered Donbas. Appearing on Russian television, Putin addressed his nation arguing that "Ukraine [has] never had a tradition of genuine statehood," justifying the invasion. Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky has stoically called for
In some cases, drawing the line between permissible and impermissible forms of public protest can be difficult. But the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” that occupied downtown Ottawa until Sunday wasn’t one of those cases. Thousands of anti-vaccine-mandate protesters, many of them driving trucks, took over a large portion of Canada’
On February 8th, scientists associated with the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion experimental facility located in Oxfordshire, UK, announced that they had achieved a sustained fusion reaction releasing 11 megawatts of thermonuclear fusion power burning a deuterium-tritium plasma mixture continuously for five seconds. Nuclear fusion energy major breakthrough, created a
I was a good friend of Harvey Weinstein during his early years as a concert promoter, before he became Harvey Weinstein, movie mogul. We subsequently drifted apart, and while Harvey went on to find astronomic success in Hollywood, I worked as the chief psychologist at the Massachusetts Treatment Center for
Over the last few years we have witnessed the alarming growth of both left-wing and right-wing populist movements in both the developed world and countries with fragile democratic traditions. Although pundits and political scientists continue to debate the precise definition of “populism,” it is accepted that the term can be
When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, one might have assumed that Cold War fiction would become irrelevant. That hasn’t turned out to be the case with Frederick Forsyth’s work. Consider, for instance, this passage from his 1979 novel, The Devil’s Alternative: The Union of